Friday, May 17, 2013

Boy, Did We Sell You a Bargain!!

As Rome burns around them, the Obama Administration is still playing the same song on their fiddles. The lone tweet on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and President Obama's Twitter accounts were reminders that repealing the Affordable Care Act would cost 25-million people "access to affordable health care". In addition to ignoring concerns about Benghazi, the IRS/Tea Party controversy and seizing reporters personal phone records, the Administration decided to also pay no attention to a new Congressional Budget Office report that finds ObamaCare will cost twice what we were all promised.

You may recall, the President told Congress and the American people that the "first decade" of the affordable care act would carry a 985-billion dollar price tag. The CBO, however, finds that the costs will actually be $1.8-TRILLION. How could the White House have been off by so much? The answer is one that is common in Washington--they just used very "creative" accounting.

The price tag first floated by the President totaled the cost of ObamaCare from the day it was approved in 2011--leaving out the fact that there would be no actual expenditures (and few benefits) until 2014! With three years of ZERO dollars figured into the "costs" of the program, it was obviously going to appear much cheaper than it actually would be. Why so few media outlets chose to ask questions about this at the time remains a mystery.

Now, the CBO is calculating the real costs of the ACA's "first decade" from the day the Federal government actually starts spending money. What is scary is that adding those three years to the computation DOUBLES the cost of the program. And the CBO report doesn't include the higher than expected start-up expenses taken on by Washington--as Republican Governors refuse to take on the costs of setting up the health insurance exchanges that are the key to making ObamaCare work.

I've got to give the President credit, it takes some real cajones to sell somebody something at twice the price they thought they were paying and then to keep reminding them what a "great deal" they got.